The Beer Nut: Brewery has a thirst for doing good deeds

At holiday time, Harpoon Brewery helps customers give back to their communities.

Norman Miller

Boston's Harpoon Brewery is one of the most successful craft breweries in the country, and it uses that success to try to give something back through its Harpoon Helps program.

This year, the brewery and its customers will take part in the fifth annual Harpoon Helps Spread Holiday Cheer event on Dec. 6.

More than 500 volunteers will decorate 33 homeless shelters and community organizations with holiday decorations and Christmas trees, brewery Director of Communications Liz Melby said.

The brewery is looking for people to donate gift cards, which they will distribute to the various homeless shelters, which will in turn give them as gifts to their clients.

"We just like to leave something under the tree so people can enjoy the holidays," said Melby.

Melby suggests people donate gift cards from places like Target, Wal-Mart, Stop & Shop, businesses that are easily accessible and where people can take public transportation.

"Dunkin Donuts is a good one -- just buying a cup of coffee goes a long way," she added.

Last year, the brewery donated nearly $8,000 worth of gift cards to the various shelters.

The Harpoon Helps program began in 2003. Melby said the brewery sends out alerts to the members of the Friends of Harpoon program via e-mail about different charity events in which the brewery is participating.

The brewery started the program several years ago with the Harpoon Five Mile run, which raised money for ALS research and the Angel Fund. They needed more volunteers than they had at the brewery, so they asked for help through the e-mail newsletter.

"We had an overwhelming response from people who wanted to come out and help," said Melby. "We had this group of beer drinkers who wanted to do something nice in their community and volunteer. The mission is to be a good neighbor in the community and to invite our customers to join us in this endeavor."

Throughout the years, Harpoon Helps has sponsored numerous community events, as well as several blood drives.

Some of the events include working on cleaning beaches with Save the Harbor, Save the Bay; putting together Braille books; community farming; and bike rides and races.

"We have something going every few weeks, and we send out an e-mail to ask people to help us with these different missions," said Melby. "I think most people want to do something great for their community."

The brewery does offer something in return.

"There is a little enticement," she said. "We go out and buy them a round of beer."

Last year alone, Harpoon Helps raised nearly $180,000 for charity. The brewery also donated 28,000 pints of beers to different charity events and logged more than 1,800 charity hours.

The Harpoon Helps Spread Holiday Cheer event began in 2004. The brewery used to host an outdoor Christmas festival, but repeated bad weather soured them on the event and they stopped having it.

"We had all of these holiday decorations and rather than discarding them, we said, 'Let's go out there and put them up,"' said Melby. Harpoon started with a small list, putting up the holiday decorations inside about 15 homeless shelters and community organizations with 150 volunteers. Every year the list of places the decorations are put up has grown.

"We all like to volunteer and we all love beer," said Melby. "It brings these two seemingly different passions together all at once. It's been a nice program for us and I really think people enjoy coming out and helping out."

If you are interested in donating a gift card to the Harpoon Helps Spread Holiday Cheer event, log onto www.myregistry.com. On the site, go to the upper left hand corner where it says "Find a Friend's Registry," and under first name, type in "Harpoon Helps," and under last name, "Spread Holiday Cheer."

For more information about the Harpoon Helps program, or to join the Friends of Harpoon, log on to harpoon.com.